The Great Taliban Jailbreak

Continued (page 5 of 6)

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Mayar, for his part, told me, "I have no one except the new warden. The new warden is my family and my friend." We were sitting inside his old office, and the film of brown dust on the coffee table between us was polka-dotted with spots where Mayar had leaned forward and jabbed his finger to emphasize some point or other. He was as loquacious as Dawari was reserved—a difference maybe not of temperament but of circumstance. For nearly three hours, Mayar expounded on the injustice of his situation with the fervency of a man who has waited long and lonely hours for a sympathetic ear. It was clear that everything he told me was something he had told himself a thousand times before.

According to Mayar, whose black hair had grown gray during his imprisonment, the prosecution's case rested on an alternate theory of how the tunnel was built: The passage was not actually dug by Ihasan and his twenty-one helpers but by Taliban prisoners from within Sarposa itself. As evidence, they have pointed to a fresh layer of loose dirt and debris spread over the political block's hard-packed courtyard. But Mayar has an explanation for this. He says that while he was warden, his Canadian advisers hired a local contractor to add the new dirt to the courtyard in order to create a slope that would allow rainwater to better drain. He told me this again and again, with the kind of exasperation you might expect from a man potentially facing execution over such a matter.

The prosecution's theory would seem simple enough to disprove. But Mayar's attorney told me that the local contractor, fearful of contradicting the government, claims his documentation of the project was destroyed in an office fire.

The Canadian government, of course, could easily confirm or deny Mayar's account. His attorney, however, says he doesn't know how to contact them. When I contacted them myself, a spokesman for their foreign office forwarded my questions about the dirt, contractor, etc., to several people at the Correctional Service of Canada (which worked with Mayar at Sarposa) and then responded that "it would be inappropriate for the Government of Canada to comment."

Mayar does not believe that the case against him has much to do with his guilt or innocence anyway. He thinks he is the victim of a vendetta. When I asked why he and his guards had been so quickly blamed, Mayar glanced at Dawari, who had joined us and was sitting silently on a leather couch across the room. "There are some powerful people here," he said, echoing suddenly the elliptical rhetoric of his friend. "I didn't obey them. I obeyed the law. That is what I'm being punished for."

A couple of weeks later, I returned to Sarposa and asked to speak with Mayar alone. We sat in the same office, mutely watching a young guard pour us tea. After the guard had left, Mayar made sure the door was closed. Then he said: "I'm glad to be able to talk to you without the warden being here. There is a conspiracy against me. I don't know whether or not to tell you the truth. It could be dangerous for me."

In Afghanistan, conspiracy theories are ubiquitous, as commonplace as the tragedies whose true meanings they purportedly reveal; nevertheless, Mayar's anxiety, at least, was bona fide. "There is the government," he said, "but inside the government there are power brokers who have their own government. They were requesting me to release prisoners or to have prisoners transferred to Kandahar so that I could release them." One of these power brokers, according to Mayar, was Ahmed Wali Karzai, the president's brother, who was assassinated last July. Before he died, Karzai had been the head of the provincial council in Kandahar and its preeminent strongman.

Mayar said that Wali Karzai turned against him after he refused to free a relative of one of his guards. "When the prison escape happened, all of the enemies I made in the government attacked me. NDS was under the control of Wali Karzai. The court was under the control of Wali Karzai. And they wanted to blame me because I didn't obey Wali Karzai."

Mayar shook his head. "Because of the way this investigation is being conducted," he said, "sometimes I think about killing myself. But suicide is a form of cowardice."

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Earlier this winter, in a nondescript house in Kandahar, I met with Rahim, the Taliban escapee (whose name here is an alias used to protect his identity). He had traveled from Helmand Province, where he was living in hiding, and had shaved his beard so as to appear less conspicuous. There was no heat in the room, and as we sat on the floor, Rahim pulled his one leg to his chest, wrapping it in his patu, a thin wool shawl worn by Afghan men. I'd been expecting a hardened veteran, a killer. Rahim was both of these things. But he was also a very young man, palpably unsure of himself, and the longer he talked the clearer it became that he was more nervous than I was. "I did not want to be a Talib," he told me. "When I saw the foreigners' behavior toward our people, I felt I had to stand up against them. It wasn't only me. Many, many people from my area joined the Taliban."

Rahim's hatred for the foreigners began about five years ago, when coalition soldiers (probably Canadians) built a road through Pashmul, Kandahar, the cluster of tiny villages where he was born and raised. "They brought big tanks and trucks and destroyed any wall and house that was in their way," he said. "They never asked permission from anyone and never paid anyone for the damage they caused. The only time they stopped was when the Taliban attacked them." According to Rahim, the soldiers often answered such attacks with air strikes and mortars that killed civilians. Seven members of his family, he told me, were injured by mortar fire.

In 2006, when Rahim and his friends were old enough, they began attending secret meetings organized by the local Taliban commander, Mullah Manan. "He was telling us the stories," he said. "He was telling us about the treatment of the people by the coalition and the cruelties of the coalition. He was encouraging us to join the Taliban." Finally, after a night raid in Pashmul during which an old man and three women were killed by special-operations forces, Rahim felt he had no choice. "I knew them personally," he explained. "They lived in my village."